Literature Review Of Human Error Risk Assessment In Engineering Systems
This research paper has been prepared to demonstrate the significant of risk management to engineering practice and the work place. A selection of a variety of risk assessment and treatment techniques will be applied to solve challenging problems. A through amount of research will be undertaken where we will implement and test different solutions to obtain the best possible outcome.
Throughout history, humans have always been prone to make mistakes which may have catastrophic consequences and ultimately cause the loss of life. This is seen evident in many disasters and accidents as diverse as medicine, space exploration, aviation and nuclear power. There are many possible reasons why this may occur i. e. no due diligence. In this paper, we are going to explore the human errors that have occurred from previous accidental events across the globe and study them in detail and produce a risk assessment on the effects of human error in the engineering systems. Human errors that can be prevented are generally a major concept to the reliability and safety of systems. Our research focus for this paper will be the changes that took place or rules and regulations that have been implemented due to the human risk error in engineering systems. There are a considerable amount of tools that are available to use in the analysis of the risk of these events such as, ETA (Event Tree Analysis), FTA (Fault Tree Analysis), & FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis). These methods are considered important as it clearly indicates and outline the possible risk in human error in engineering systems. As a result, we are able to clearly identify the significant impact on operational effectives and the risk management through human error.
The first piece of literature we have reviewed was a paper which had a key focus on nuclear energy as a result of the Chernobyl accident. It indicated that additional steps have been added by different countries in regards to their licensing process in order for them to be able to control and manage their risks to avoid accidents like these re-occurring. For example, In the United States, Many Applications of Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) to regulatory issues have been undertaken as a result of the Chernobyl accident, this includes the Nuclear Regulatory Commission which has made significant advances in regards to the application and development of risk based technology. [1]The paper also went on further to discuss and show how the integrated risk, human factors, reliability and analysis of safety can combine together to act as a way of reducing human error risk.
We believe that this paper has validity as there are discussions and mentions of FTA, ETA & FEMA, and these have been discussed in line with our current studies and is shown true the effectiveness each different risk analysis tool represents. Furthermore, we have done additional reading into the sources mention in this paper regarding and it is evident that the information which is portrayed in the source is reflected within the paper.
Our second piece of literature we have reviewed is “Human Factors Analysis in Risk Assessment: A survey of methods and tools used in industry”. This paper outlines the results between a series of 15 interviewers undertaken to establish the methods and tools currently used to support risk assessment in industry. The interviews covered general risk assessment, but also looked specifically at human factors tools and methods in use, both in terms of the representation of the system under analysis and in terms of human reliability analysis or other tools to identify and analyse human error.
We have chosen this specifically to obtain a better understanding of the amount of human interaction between machinery that still takes place in the industry.
